Team Building Challenges for Employee Engagement

Team building exercises might get a bad rap, but if you get them right they can do wonders for your employee engagement levels.

Get to grips with the four stages of team building and the five types of team building activities and you’ll know exactly what you need to do to get your teammates pulling together to achieve their goals.

Read on to learn how to use simple team building challenges to boost employee engagement across your business.

What are the four stages of team building?

Every team goes through four distinct stages. Learning how to recognize which stage your team is at will help you understand how to get the best from them.

The four stages of team building are:

Forming

When a team is forming, team members tend to be equally excited to be part of a new team and anxious about how they’re going to fit in and how things are going to go. 

You can expect team members to ask a lot of questions at this stage as they try to find their footing and relieve their anxieties.

It’s crucial at this early stage that you focus your team’s energy around:

• Establishing clear goals and expectations,
• Building trust between team members,
• Setting clear processes and defining responsibilities.

Book a demo of Assembly to make it easy to create a project plan your whole team can access from anywhere. 

Storming

Teams always set off with big goals. But sooner or later, they’re going to fall short of their own high expectations. This is the storming stage, and it’s when your team learns how to handle setbacks and conflict together. It’s the team building equivalent of the terrible twos – which every parent is well acquainted with.

When you hit this stage, it’s time to regroup and:

• Break your goals down into manageable steps you can tackle more easily,
• Help your teammates learn how to work together more effectively, 
• Rethink how you share responsibility across your team.

Norming

Any team that makes it through the storming stage comes out the other end stronger. Team members become more comfortable with how the team operates and where they fit in it. They feel free to express their “real” thoughts and feelings, and can start to give and receive the kind of constructive criticism that’s going to take your team’s performance to the next level.

Telltale signs your team has shifted into the norming stage are your team members:

• Making an effort to proactively resolve conflicts before they start affecting the team dynamic,
• Being willing to ask for help when they need it, 
• Developing their own nicknames and inside jokes. 

You can help encourage this with some well-chosen team building activities (we’ll dive into some examples later).

Performing

When a team hits the performing stage, they’re comfortable asking for help when they need it and offering it where it’s needed. 

Team members look out for each other, roles become more fluid as members take on responsibilities where they’re most needed, and the whole team is fully engaged. And each team member believes that when the team wins, they win.

As a leader of a team that hits this stage, it’s essential you keep your team going in the right direction with some team bonding activities (more on those in the next section).

What are the five types of team building activities?

The right activities at the right time will fast-track your team through the four stages of team building. 

To help you get things note-perfect every time, here’s a rundown of all five types of team building activities – and some examples of each one you can try today:

Icebreakers 

It’s all about breaking the ice with teams in the forming stage. The faster your teammates get to know each other, the sooner they’ll be comfortable sharing their honest thoughts and feelings with each other.

Here are some classic icebreakers to help get a new team opening up with each other:

• Two truths and a lie: Ask each member of your team to share two facts about themselves and one lie. Then get their teammates to guess the lie. 
• 18 and under: Go around the room asking each member of your team to share one thing they accomplished before they turned 18. Discovering each other's hidden skills can help bring your teammates closer together.
• Invent a secret handshake: Divide your team into pairs and give them a minute to come up with the most creative secret handshake they can. Then go around the room and ask each pair to demonstrate their handshake to the group. This one is bound to get everyone laughing.

Need more icebreaker activity ideas? Check out a list of over 400 icebreaker questions.

Communication 

Good communication is the cornerstone of any effective team. And when your team hits the storming stage you need to develop effective lines of communications – fast. These simple exercises will help:

• Scavenger hunt: Split your team into small groups and give them all the same list of items to find. The first team that takes a selfie with each item on the list wins. Teams will have to split up and communicate effectively to claim first place.
• Blind retriever: Divide your team into small groups. One member of each small group is blindfolded and the rest have to guide the blindfolded team member to an object. 
• Island survival: Break the group into teams, then explain they’ve all been stranded on a desert island after a shipwreck. They find 20 items washed up on the shore, but they’re only allowed to keep five – and they need to decide together which items they’re going to keep. Then they need to present which items they’ve kept – and why – to the other groups.

Try Assembly to see how easy it can make effective communication across departments.

Problem-solving

The faster your team can solve the problems they’re inevitably going to face, the more effective they’ll be. These simple activities will help your team learn how to work together to overcome obstacles:

• Egg drop: Split your teammates into groups, provide them with some basic construction materials (like newspaper, balloons, rubber bands, and popsicle sticks), and ask them to create a device that will protect an egg when it’s dropped from a height. The team who’s egg survives the farthest fall is crowned the winner.
• Marshmallow spaghetti tower: Split your team into groups and ask them to build the tallest possible freestanding tower using only marshmallows, uncooked spaghetti, tape, and string. Tallest tower wins!
• Escape room: Taking your team to an escape room is the ultimate way to put their problem solving and teamwork skills to the test.

Creative thinking

Helping your teammates unlock their creativity is one of the best things you can do for their performance. These exercises will encourage them to think outside the box:

• Alternate use pitches: Split your team into groups, give each one an object from around the office, and ask them to come with a quick sales pitch about an alternative use for it. Breaking the real life “rules” of the object can spark creativity. 
• The backronym game: Split your team into pairs and present every team with the same jumble of random letters (RAOB, PWL, etc.). Ask each pair to come up with a backronym that fits the letters – and only give them a minute to write it to encourage quick thinking. 
• Telephone pictionary: Ask your team to sit in a circle, then give each team member a stack of paper. Get everyone to write a well-known phrase on the top piece of paper (“the early bird gets the worm”, “better late than never”, etc.). Ask your team to pass their stack of paper to the person on their right, then give them all a minute to draw the phrase on the next sheet. When the minute is up, they need to pass the stack of paper on to the next person, who  writes down the phrase they think has been drawn. Repeat the process until each stack of paper reaches its original owner and see if you managed to keep the thread.

Book a demo of Assembly to see how much of the stress it can take out of managing teams and projects.

Employee bonding

For a team to reach the performing stage, its members will need to form strong relationships with each other. Encourage that with these activities:

• Potluck: Hold regular potluck lunches to bring your employees together for a meal and let them share their favorite foods and recipes.
• Community service: Bring your team together to support a cause that’s close to their hearts. 
• Fun activity: Karaoke, go karting, laser tag, and cooking classes are all fertile ground for team building opportunities.

The final word

Once you recognize which stage of the team building process your team is at, you can pick the perfect activities to help them reach the next stage as quickly as possible.

Stick to the tips we’ve laid out here to make sure your team bonds as quickly as possible.